The bowler hat, the moustache, the walk: even if you’ve never seen a Charlie Chaplin film, the Little Tramp is still one of the most recognisable figures in cinema history, argues British director James Spinney. “There’s still a powerful cultural residue more than 100 years after his first steps on screen.”
Spinney and his co-director Peter Middleton, who together made 2016’s triple-Bafta-nominated Notes on Blindness, set out to explore this “residue” in their new documentary, The Real Charlie Chaplin.
It’s not about debating whether Chaplin was the world’s greatest silent movie star – there will always be those who favour Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton. Rather, it lifts the lid on Chaplin’s troubled personal and political life.
“Despite his wealth and fame, he had this restlessness, and people still didn’t feel like they knew him,” says Middleton.
“It followed him through his life, all the way to Switzerland, and his last few decades with his family [his eight children and fourth and final wife, Oona O’Neill].”
The film-makers interviewed several of Chaplin’s 11 children, and the most revealing and poignant words are heard from his third-youngest, Jane Chaplin, now 64.
“Jane describes her yearning to have a conversation alone with him,” says Spinney. “There is this sense that she felt she had grown up with the icon but had no idea who the man really was.”
There have been Chaplin films before, of course. Famously, Robert Downey Jr played him in Sir Richard Attenborough’s 1992 Oscar-nominated film Chaplin, which plumped for the rags-to-riches story that began with his poverty-stricken childhood in late Victorian London.
Perhaps more intriguing was 2001’s The Cat’s Meow, directed by Peter Bogdanovich: Eddie Izzard played Chaplin at age 35, when rumours abounded that he had impregnated the teenage Lita Grey.
Grey, who began acting with Chaplin aged 12 in 1921’s The Kid, became pregnant at 15 during the shoot of his next epic, The Gold Rush. Chaplin hastily wed Grey in 1924 after she refused to get an abortion. They had two boys, but were divorced by 1927, with Grey granted a settlement of $825,000, the largest in US history at the time. Grey branded Chaplin “cruel and inhumane” in the divorce papers, copies of which sold on the streets in their thousands.
If this would taint Chaplin as a philanderer, a predator and a man prone to violence, it never quite stuck. Grey was dismissed in just two offhand sentences in Chaplin’s own chronicle of his life, 1964’s My Autobiography.
“She spent a lot of her life after that relationship trying to tell that story in different ways,” says Spinney. She wrote two books, My Life with Chaplin and Wife of the Life of the Party, yet it was akin to shouting in a hurricane.
“People loved the Little Tramp and they didn’t want to believe these stories about him,” says Middleton.
Of Chaplin’s four wives – three of whom were teenagers when he married them – Grey is the only one whose voice remains on tape, yet the argument can be made that she was never really heard.
“In some ways, her story had been told by men,” says Spinney, “whether it was the divorce lawyers, who slightly stage-managed the divorce case, or her first biography, which was partly ghostwritten.”
Indeed, if Chaplin was the first global celebrity, as the film suggests, Grey emerges as an early victim of Hollywood, decades before the #MeToo movement. It wasn’t simply that Chaplin was beloved by millions, argues Middleton. “Chaplin no doubt employed enormous resources to manage his public image.”
The film includes a dramatisation of an interview Chaplin gave in 1966, using actual audio from the encounter.
“It’s quite clear that Chaplin is putting down clear parameters about the subjects he’s prepared to talk about,” says Middleton. “At one point, he says ‘this isn’t a confessional box’.
It speaks to the idea that often surrounds people who have power: they have the power to use silence – to not have to answer things.”
Although the film offers no excuses for Chaplin’s behaviour, there is the suggestion that he was deeply paranoid, stemming back to his childhood. “Even when he was fantastically wealthy, he never felt secure,” says Spinney.
But it would be wrong to characterise The Real Charlie Chaplin as setting out to bash its subject. It pays ample tribute to his genius – the way, for example, he continued making silent movies such as City Lights and Modern Times as the talkies came in. It also recognises his courage, daringly satirising Hitler by playing fascist leader Adenoid Hynkel in 1940 masterpiece The Great Dictator.
It was here that Chaplin literally broke his silence, speaking on screen for the first time. As a Jewish barber, he delivers a stirring speech about tolerance. “In this world,” he says, “there is room for everyone.”
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If this brought an end to the Tramp character, it simultaneously saw Chaplin find his voice, as he was invited to deliver the same speech at the inauguration of US President Franklin D Roosevelt.
The problem was, the film suggests, Chaplin never stopped talking, and he began to make approving remarks about communism, which made him a target of the FBI and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s so-called communist witch-hunts.
Remarkably, the film contains fragments of a press conference given by Chaplin before the release of 1947’s Monsieur Verdoux, when he was famously accused of being a communist.
“It feels like Chaplin is almost on trial,” says Middleton, who together with Spinney located the recording in a San Francisco garage belonging to the widow of a reporter.
Until now, the full version has never been heard – and, engulfed by political scandal, it heralds Chaplin’s years in the wilderness. Yet, as the film shows, there was to be one final curtain call when, in 1972, the Academy gave Chaplin an Honorary Oscar. Hollywood has a remarkable capacity to forgive and forget.
The Real Charlie Chaplin is in cinemas now
